Risk-based surveillance in the pork chain—requirements and challenges

In the pork chain, there is a plethora of food-borne hazards for which there is a need of monitoring or surveillance: bacteria, parasites, viruses, toxic and pharmacological residues and drug-resistant microbes. In the European Union (EU) , Salmonella is currently number two, when it comes to the number of human cases, causing 91,662 human cases, and number one when focus in on cases ascribed to pig meat (EFSA/ECDC, 2018). Parasites—and in particular Taenia solium—play a large a devastating role on the African continent (FERG, 2015). Moreover, there is an increasing attention on antimicrobial resistant bacteria on pig meat without much knowledge about the full implications of human exposure—see e.g the annual reports from the Danish DANMAP surveillance on https://www.danmap.org/.